∞ Apple executive leaves in the wake of iPhone antenna woes

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Apple confirmed on Saturday that Mark Papermaster, Apple’s senior vice president of Devices Hardware Engineering, is leaving the company.

Apple spokesperson Steve Dowling confirmed in a statement to The New York Times that Papermaster “is leaving the company and Bob Mansfield, senior vice president of Macintosh hardware engineering, is assuming his responsibilities.”

It’s unclear if Papermaster was asked to leave or if he left on his own.

Papermaster headed the iPod and iPhone engineering teams at Apple. It would have been his teams that were responsible for the iPhone 4 and its controversial antenna design.

Papermaster’s bio has also been removed from Apple’s website.

While the antenna design on the iPhone 4 may have been revolutionary, customers began complaining about signal loss as soon as the device was released. This ultimately lead Apple to offer its customers a free case.


  • Rory B

    hmm, isn’t he the one, if I recall, that Apple fought with IBM over just a few years ago?

  • G

    Glad he didn’t divulge any IBM trade secrets, though. Whew!

    • Jim Dalrymple

      LOL

  • Keith

    master! … MASTER!!!

    Master of paper you’re gathering you’re things…

    • Peter Cohen

      Papermaster, not Antennamaster…

  • JohnO

    I often wonder about these high profile departures. Did he leave just because of his position as leader of the group, or did he leave because of something more directly related to the antenna problem? For example, was an issue escalated to him, and he decided that the signal loss wasn’t that big of an issue, and approved moving forward?

    John

    • Ian Davies

      Well, as head of the group one would hope that he was fully aware of what his team was up to, and would therefore assume that he approved whatever passed for final engineering, so the buck stops with him.
      However, taking that approach to its logical conclusion, and bearing in mind how personally involved Jobs tends to be with high-profile projects like this, is it reasonable to say that Jobs should shoulder some responsibility too?

  • Belius

    This is a monumental error on Apple’s part. I can see the industrial design guys not wanting to shield the antenna so it won’t ruin the looks and the marketing guys not wanting to delay the product for a redesign, the manufacturing guys not wanting to scrap all the case parts, the engineering guys not wanting to admit to a stupid design error all fighting with the quality and reliability assurance guys about what to do when the problem surfaced during the field test period before the product was released. With industrial design, marketing, engineering, and manufacturing minimizing the problem, you can see how the quality assurance guys were overruled. Jobs apparently had the last word and made an incredibly dumb decision to go ahead with product release.